A tenant farmer's deprivation-lined face. Antebellum homes that have seen better days. The display windows of small-town main streets. The early subway commuter. Billboards. The images made by photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975) are icons of national identity that have shaped Americans' views of themselves and directly influenced important currents of modern art. This major catalogue—published to accompany a retrospective exhibition originating at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and traveling to San Francisco and Houston—presents the full range of Evans's work, from his 1920s black-and-white street scenes of anonymous urban dwellers to the color photographs of signs and letter forms from his final years.

Soon after he returned from Paris to New York City in 1927, Evans began contributing to the development of American photography. He captured the substance of people and buildings with a spare elegance that is utterly unpretentious. His gaze is serious but often amused as well, direct yet never simple. During the 1930s, Evans traveled throughout the South to chronicle the effects of economic hardship. The time that he and writer James Agee spent with Alabama sharecropper families yielded an evocative, honest record of the Great Depression, which was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans then turned his lens back on New Yorkers, photographing subway riders with a camera hidden in his coat. He continued to influence American self-perception as staff photographer for Fortune from 1945 until he accepted a professorship at Yale in 1965.

Evans—who always chose art over what he criticized as artiness—wrote, in Photography (1969), "Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. This man is in effect a voyeur by nature; he is also reporter, tinkerer, and spy."

Although his work has received many awards, been enshrined in the best museums, and been exhibited on several continents, Evans's total corpus is only now being fully examined. This important book revises our appreciation of Evans by presenting previously unknown material in an accessible context. Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Doug Eklund, and Mia Fineman offer novel insights into the sources and legacy of Evans's work. The result is a superb exploration of what was achieved by one of our finest, mostly deeply American artists.

Table of contents

Sponsor's StatementDirector's ForewordAcknowledgmentsLenders to the ExhibitionA Note to the Reader

A Portrait of the ArtistMarian Morris Hambourg

Exile's Return: The Early Work, 1928–34Douglas Eklund

"The Cruel Radiance of What Is": Walker Evans and the SouthJeff L. Rosenheim

Notes from Underground: The Subway PortraitsMia Fineman

"The Harassed Man's Haven of Detachment": Walker Evans and the Fortune PortfolioDouglas Eklund

Caldwell, John, and Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, with Dale T. Johnson. American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born by 1815. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.

Gardner, Albert TenEyck, and Stuart P. Feld. American Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1, Painters Born by 1815. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1965.

Caldwell, John, and Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, with Dale T. Johnson. American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born by 1815. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.

Fong, Wen C. Between Two Cultures: Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.

Gardner, Albert TenEyck, and Stuart P. Feld. American Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1, Painters Born by 1815. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1965.

Sterling, Charles, and Margaretta Salinger. French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 2, Nineteenth Century. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1966.

Sterling, Charles, and Margaretta Salinger. French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 3, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1967.

Hambourg, Maria Morris, and Christopher Phillips. The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars. The Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989.

Rosenheim, Jeff. "The Bedroom." Connections. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011.

Exhibition

Walker Evans

This major retrospective of the work of American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975) displays some 175 vintage prints from public and private collections throughout the United States and Canada, and draws on newly available material from the photographer's archive, which was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1994. The photographs span the artist's long and productive career, focusing not only on the classic pictorial documents of America during the Depression, but also on little-known experimental images from the 1920s, photo-essays for Fortune magazine from the 1940s and 1950s, and SX-70 Polaroid color prints from the 1970s. The exhibition is accompanied by two publications: a monographic treatment of Evans's work; and an anthology of materials that makes available for the first time the artist's early short stories, important letters, and critical essays now housed in the Walker Evans Archive.

Reacting against the Pictorialist tradition of Stieglitz, Steichen, and others of the preceding generation of photographers, Evans banished all artiness and artifice from his practice and let the subject—be it a West Virginia coal miner, a roadside vegetable stand in Alabama, or a torn movie poster on Cape Cod—reveal itself directly to the viewer with exquisite candor. He recorded everyday life in many forms: popular culture, the iconography of commerce and consumerism, the automobile and its impact on the landscape, new poverty, old wealth, and everything in between.